[Techtalk] 'nother obvious newbie question

Mary Gardiner linuxchix at puzzling.org
Tue Oct 2 15:06:48 EST 2001


On Mon, Oct 01, 2001 at 09:29:49PM -0700, Rachel Herold wrote:
> okay, I get it installed, how come I can't figure out how to read the dern
> doc files?  I found a whole set of help files ending in .gz but haven't been
> able to figure out how to read/open them.  I've tried all the obvious
> things, a few non-obvious things (at least non-obvious to a windows person),
> but I give up and decided I shouldn't waste so much time (2 hours is enough)
> when I can ask someone.

Files ending in a .gz extension are GZ-compressed files. You can compress a
file using the command 'gzip filename' and decompress it using 'gunzip
filename'

In this case however, I tend to use the program zless, which will display the
contents of a gzipped file without decompressing it - 'zless filename'

zless behaves exactly like the program 'less':
* Press the spacebar to go down one page
* Press the up and down arrows to move up and down a line
* Press page up (at least, in some terminals) to go up an entire page
* Press / to search the document for a word or phrase (or, I think, regular
  expression)

-Mary.

-- 
Mary Gardiner
<mary at puzzling.org>




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